Myth, the Universe, and Everything

It's Friday, and it's high time to do a guest blog! A little spoiler for next week: I have a brand new contribution lined up! Alayna Williams, author of Dark Oracle, is going to pop by, complete with contest. So, bookmark next Friday. :)

Alayna and I got to chatting about tarot cards over at Pocket After Dark, which reminded me of a brilliant novel by Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps. I knew next to nothing about Tarot prior to reading the novel, and Williams's use of the cards is, as per his usual, deeply symbolic and spiritual. In our game during the England trip (the "dirigible" game), I had a young Williams using Tarot cards to create protective circles, based on my memories of the novel. Below is an excerpt from the novel and (hurrah!) a contest. I'll send you a copy of The Greater Trumps for your own reading pleasure if you'll tell me what card you've drawn from a deck of your imagining. Take that in any direction you like. Contest ends on Wednesday the 22nd, so I can announce the winner on the 23rd, and get ready for Alayna to join us on the 24th!

(Also, feel free to comment even if you don't want to be entered in the contest, but let me know you don't want a prize. *g*)

--

She picked up the last card, that numbered nought, and exhibited it. It might have needed some explanation, for it was obscure enough. It was painted with the figure of a young man, clothed in an outlandish dress of four striped colours--black and grey and silver and red; his legs and feet and arms and hands were bare, and he had over one shoulder a staff, carved into serpentine curves, that carried a round bag, not unlike the balls with which the Juggler played. The bag rested against his shoulder, so that as he stood there he supported as well as bore it. Before him a dragon-fly, or some such airy creature, danced; by his side a larger thing, a lynx or young tiger, stretched itself up to him--whether in affection or attack could not be guessed, so poised between both the beast stood. The man's eyes were very bright; he was smiling, and the smile was so intense and rapt that those looking at it felt a quick motion of contempt--no sane man could be as happy as that. He was painted as if pausing in his stride, and there was no scenic background; he and his were seen against a flatness of dull gold.

"No," said Henry, "that's the difficulty--at least, it's the unknown factor."

"The unknown factor in what?" Mr. Coningsby asked."

"In--" Henry paused a second, then he added, "in telling fortunes by the Tarots. There are different systems, you know, but none of them is quite convincing in what it does with the Fool.... They are very curious cards, and this is a very curious pack."

"Why are they curious cards?" Nancy went on questioning.

Henry, still staring at them, answered, "It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance."

There are some fun, original new guest blogs coming up soon, but today, I was drawn back to my collection of the writings of Charles Williams, which I studied for my course on the Inklings in college. I've not read them in some time, and it looks as though I argued quite a bit with Williams in the margins! But his philosophy of co-inherence continues to intrigue me. (It played a large role in the game I co-ran on the England trip -- this is the trip that also made me giggle every time the word "dirigibles" has been used since, but that might be a story for another day.)

So, here is a short excerpt from Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, which in turn is excerpted from The Descent of the Dove.

--

At the beginning of life in the natural order is an act of substitution and co-inherence. A man can have no child unless his seed is received and carried by a woman; a woman can have no child unless she receives and carries the seed of a man--literally bearing the burden. It is not only a mutual act; it is a mutual act of substitution. The child itself for nine months literally co-inheres in its mother; there is no human creature that has not sprung from such a period of such an interior growth.

...

It has been the habit of the church to baptize it, as soon as it has emerged, by the formula of the Trinity-in-Unity. As it passes from the most material co-inherence it is received into the supernatural; an it is received by a deliberate act. ... The faith into which he is received has declared that principle to be the root and the pattern of the supernatural as of the natural world. And the faith is the only body to have done so. It has proclaimed that this is due to the deliberate choice and operation of the divine Word. Had he willed, he could presumably have raised for his Incarnation a body in some other way than he chose. But he preferred to shape himself within the womb, to become hereditary, to owe to humanity the flesh he divinitized by the same principle--"not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God." By an act of substitution he reconciled the natural world with the world of the kingdom of heaven, sensuality with substance. He restored substitution and co-inherence everywhere; up and down the ladder of that great substitution all our lesser substitutions run; within that sublime co-inherence all our lesser co-inherences inhere. And when the Christian church desired to define the nature of the Alone, she found no other term; It mutually co-inheres by Its own nature. The triune formula by which the child is baptized is precisely the incomprehensible formula of this.

It is supernatural, but also it is natural. ... The denunciation of individualism means this or it means nothing. The praise of individualism must allow for this or it is mere impossible anarchy.